Vanessa DiMauro

The finest social business leadership team or community manager can benefit from a little outside guidance, fresh ideas, new perspectives and best practices to keep the social business machinery humming. The good news is that successful communities can perform even better, and laggards can make significant improvements, when the right strategic, tactical, operational, technical and organizational changes are implemented.

That’s the key: identifying and implementing the right changes to keep your community on track. What kind of activities, practices and behaviors should be assessed to ensure it is healthy and operating efficiently to generate the greatest returns? There are well over 120 checkpoints to assess an online community’s strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for growth and greater success.

Social business is becoming a transformational strategy for companies to get closer to their key stakeholders in innovative ways. ROI, metrics, strategic alignment, operational impact of social business – this is what it is all about!

Online communities are not a new phenomenon, but they are now capturing the hearts and minds of social media users around the globe. There seems to be an online community for every walk of life or group. But the underlying operations of a given community can vary drastically, depending on whether it is consumer-focused or a business-to-business community. If you are building or running an online community, or a member of one or more, it is important to understand the differences to maximize the value of your online home. Some organizations do not realize there are a variety of different online community models to explore – each with its own set of benefits and challenges. Below is a brief overview of the different types of community models:

In this new age of paid vs owned vs earned media, I see strong parallels between those who are still playing in the kiddie leagues and those who are athletes. I’ll grant you it’s not black and white — there are different forms of performance with owned and earned media.

Paid media is straightforward – a company pays for advertising or promotion.

Earned media is about publicity that comes naturally, organically and without payment.

Leader Networks comes to the table with both broad understanding of social networking and specific expertise in building and nurturing business-oriented specialty online communities. The skill and experience of the team of experts who helped us plan and execute our project was irreplaceable.